Rainbow Six Siege improving chat bans in war on toxicity

Share this:

In their ongoing mission to make people on the Internet behave, god damn it, just behave for five god damn minutes, Ubisoft this week are overhauling the system which bans players from Rainbow Six Siege for saying terrible things. Ubi already ban players for awfulness, but say this week’s improvement “is going to make us significantly more efficient” in cracking down on racial and homophobic slurs and other hate speech.

Depending on how awful they are, players could be banned for two days, one week, fifteen days, or full-on forever. Ubi call this their “first step towards managing toxicity in Rainbow Six Siege”, promising more changes to come. So please, just behave.

If you’re concerned about how this might affect you, consider that you’re likely being a dick and making video games worse.

Robinson explains that the system will name and shame players too:

Players that receive a ban for toxicity will receive a pop-up that states their ban was the result of toxic behavior. A global message will also be displayed, similar to the current global broadcasts for cheating. It will read:

“Username has been banned for toxicity.”

As for Ubi’s other plans to clean up Siege, Robinson says that yes, they do have plans for fighting teamkilling too.

“It is not a low priority,” he said in response to a shouty comment. “It is much harder to correct than monitoring chat.” He promises more details on that, and other offensives in the war on toxicity, later.

67 Comments

This has been the only game for me where the bigotry and racism was so bad that I felt compelled to find a way to report people by going to Ubisoft’s website and navigating my way to their report in-game players section. There should be consequences for being human garbage, even online. Hopefully they make it easier to report those players in game.

Gold-Platinum player here: In my experience in general toxicity was pretty low in R6:Siege compared to say Rocket League. Maybe that’s because I’m mostly playing with 2-4 friends and/or it’s less common in higher ranks.

But to me freaking lag switching and cheating are much, much bigger problems! Especially lag switching could be solved quite easily one would think, still it’s happening about every 3rd or 4th match! It’s nearly impossible to win against an all 130-150 ping team at the same rank.

Why am I not surprised that a girl named Alice can’t handle mere WORDS in a lousy video game?
“Hate speech” does not exist.
It is nebulous and entirely subjective. If you ask 10,000 people for a complete list of what they deem “hate speech” you’ll end up with 10,000 different lists. Everyone has a different standard, and only a narcissistic, totalitarian maniac would seek to impose their own subjective limitations of “hate speech” onto the speech of someone else.

If you can’t handle what people say, you have 3 options:
1. Man up and stop acting like a damn sissy over mere words.
2. Block or mute the person you don’t like.
3. LOG OFF THE BLOODY INTERNET!
No one is holding a gun to your head telling you to play a game, or to use Twitter, Facebook, or whatever it is you’re doing. You are fully empowered to simply walk away at any time. Just log off. Simple enough.

The internet has become as toxic as it is not because of “online bullies,” but because of these awful “cry bullies” who use authoritarian tactics to silence and suppress anyone who challenges their orthodoxy. The people who feel so threatened as to demand the policing of speech are the fascists of the 21st century.

Pick up a copy of 1984 or Animal Farm and give it a read, won’t you? Perhaps you might learn a thing or two about the importance of free speech, and why it is important to protect the speech you don’t like—not the speech you do like.
Cheers.

Extremely and unnecessarily angry over cutting down on online incivility, masquerading as fighting perceived attacks on their right to freedom of speech, sure.

To put my response in short terms though, everyone has the right to freedom of speech. Nobody has the right to make everyone else listen to that speech, or force any platform host it.

So if Ubisoft wants to cut down on racial slurs and other epithets within the community, in an attempt to spur a friendlier environment (and get more people buying and playing), that’s their prerogative.

Apologies, but you’ll have to take that behaviour elsewhere. And if few other places are tolerant of such intolerance, then perhaps reflect on why. Maybe you’re just a victim of evil evil censorship, or maybe people are just tired of that kind of crap.

When you say “No one is holding a gun to your head telling you to play a game, or to use Twitter, Facebook, or whatever it is you’re doing.” note that this applies to you too. You don’t have a god-given right to go onto someone else’s game and shit up their day with bigotry or harassment or whatever.

If YOU can’t handle a game where the communications system is policed because a proportion of the playerbase is driving customers away – and in your case, you’re actually telling people they should log off the internet so you seem to be *deliberately* driving their customers away – then you can take your own advice and go somewhere else.

See how it works? The private companies that run these games are under no obligation to carry your harassment or hate speech over their channels. Those companies got their freedoms too, and they’re using it to stop over-entitled brats shitting over their bottom line and their product’s reputation.

Hmmm. Let’s de construct this pathetic tweenage whinge. Just in case OP decides to have a revelation or anyone is daft enough to think there’s any merit in this reactionary bollocks.

First, the author’s gender has no bearing on this discussion. Seems that Ironfist (possibly named for the shittiest of the Marvel series) thinks women have problems with language that men do not. I’d ask Ironfist to explain this and give some reasoning, but let’s be honest he’s either already been grounded for the comment, or is back to licking paint.

Hate speech exists. You are correct about it being a nebulous concept. That is why companies who ban it give clear guidelines as to what they consider hate speech. As Alice said if you think this effects you, then you’re likely a terrible piece of human trash. But we knew that.

If you can’t handle that then don’t play the game. Your logic is people should ‘man up’, mute players or log off. If you don’t like Ubi’s stance on tackling hate speech, don’t play the game. Simple. Oh but you want to play the game right? So do other people. And under Ubi’s own terms they are entitled to do it without being subjected to a barrage or racial and homophobic slurs from squawking man children.

No one is holding a gun to your head. At least outside of the game.

The internet is as toxic as it ever was. However as online gaming has found a larger and larger audience publishers are more keenly aware of the impact that toxicity can have on the long term life of their games. This is doubly important in a game such as R6:S, which is a long term investment.

The fascism remark is just utterly darling. I’d also put money on you having never read 1984 or animal farm.

The landscape of online gaming is changing. Shitty attitudes and verbal abuse are no longer acceptable. At long last. And even better companies are doing something about it.

Now, go have a wank or something and when you’ve calmed down perhaps you could man up and apologise for your elongated brain turd of a comment.

Calling a woman a girl and then telling her (and/or us) to ‘man up’ tells me that you probably have underlying issues you probably need to resolve.

Whenever I come across a person like you I always console myself that I only had to see you but briefly. You have to live with yourself for the rest of your life. Or at least until you grow the fuck up.

You’re right we should just let our youth scream out the N word like its 2004 except without the context of it being sarcasm and more like the modern internet racism of it being straight faced and actually hateful- oh wait no

I think we’re going to go with option 4:
Actively work together to make the internet a more welcoming place that anyone can feel somewhat comfortable visiting, without having to endure harassment from random empathyless people that need to yell at others to feel good about themselves.

You know, kind of like society tends to frown on you walking up and yell swears into the face of little old ladies in the streets.

I don’t usually comment here, but now i just had to.
Discussions on a lot of gaming sites and forums tend to get pretty toxic, but not on RPS.
I love this community, you’re all amazing beautiful people!

Hahaha a private company banning people from its servers for being assholes is an erosion of free speech now? Rich stuff here. You realize that the people being harassed also have a right to free speech? And that the harassers are infringing upon it by drowning them out? Freedom of speech should have limits like anything else as your freedom is sometimes someone else’s restriction. All of civilization is a reasonable compromise. Get with it.

Good post in the main, Ironfist…;) Attempting to force people into some one-size-fits-all mold of values, and trying to punish them for expressing their own private opinions to the contrary, is absolutely guaranteed to produce the opposite results. It’s human nature–tell people “you can’t do this” and they’ll rush to prove you wrong…;)

People are to be pitied who cannot hold their own beliefs and opinions without trying to insist that everyone else think the way that they do–and if they differ–well, then these very narrow-minded people think trying to force them to “conform” is a good idea. Never work–not in a million years.

That said, I would draw the line at what is “permissible” public and semi-public speech at gratuitous, idiotic profanity and threats of violence made against specific people. Those at least are objective categories and justifiable. But the whole “ban hate speech” notion is repugnant simply because one man’s hate speech is another man’s facts, and vice versa. I feel sorry for people who are so insecure in their own beliefs and opinions that they feel they must try to force everyone around them to think and speak and act just like they do. It’s just not going to happen. What will happen, instead, is a vicious backlash against such tyrannical impositions, imo. History is fairly clear on that.

The internet has categorically gotten more hostile and dumber. Back when it was rad, most of the good sites were actually really, really strict about shit. It’s not a new thing, instead, people forgot how to enforce it.

The games, the sites, whatever. They aren’t yours. They aren’t your fucking house. If you go into a restaurant and raise a scene you’ll get kicked the fuck out. Think like that online. Use your head. Don’t be an asshole. Don’t be a loud angry racist.

It’s not a public space, so you can have zero expectations of free speech. The company can set any rules it wants depending upon what the market will bear. I prefer RPS’s rules to someone who wants to justify abuse. Just because something is technically legal doesn’t mean it’s advisable either. We’re trying to have a civilization here.

Yeah, I am worried that all this praise Alice gets will get her poached by another site. It has happened before, so like, maybe just settle for giving her a thumbs up when her back is turned, or something.

This game is predicated on team work which requires coordination through voice chat. One of the joys of online gaming is finding like minded strangers that you can coordinate with in games like this. Ubi wishes to have as many people comfortable playing their product as possible so that they can make more money, so they are implementing measures to get rid of loud individuals who drive the larger audience away. It is a real shame if you like 95% of an experience only for 5% to ruin it and make you “not go to the bar” as you say. Your analogy also makes no sense, because the people being harassed/annoyed are not addicted to being harassed/annoyed. In fact you could say the people being assholes are the ones addicted to the behavior and should be forcefully removed from the bar for everyone’s sake. Which is kind of what Ubi is trying to do. Very few people want to go to a bar where someone is pissing on your feet or yelling in fake “Ugandan” while you are trying to have a chat with some friends. The bar owner would be an idiot to not try and remove the pissy yeller.

From my 150 hours of Siege, it seems like the “toxicity” is mostly confined to Casual play, where it’s less about rampant racism and more just heavily distorted micspam and people erotically roleplaying in text chat. The latter is a little bit off-putting as there is no method to block text chatting, but muting other players’ microphones is trivially easy. I don’t doubt there are players who cannot conceive the idea of playing without blocking mics, but it seems like some people need to learn how to use features integrated into the game before complaining that they’re incapable of making use of said features.

As for teamkilling, that also feels like a mostly-solved issue, since 2 TKs in a round results in an autokick as well as cooldown from matchmaking and a reduction in XP/Reknown gains; further TKs resulting in longer lockouts. Sure, there will always be some clowns who band together to join games and piss people off, but Siege is populous enough to just join a different game.

If they want to reduce toxicity in the game, they should stop forcing everyone to play that godawful Bartlett University Bomb Defuse mission from terrorist hunt – the one with all the yellow smoke that AI sees through.

They could also try and give players a better experience by not putting them in streaks of unwinnable games. Losing every single round over and over again is a toxic experience.

Can’t say I fully agree. I agree with the intent, as online playing has to be an enjoyable experience, but I do not agree with the means. It is ok to ban on grounds of “illegal” speech, as we have a law that says what is illegal but “dangerous, threatening, abusive, obscene, vulgar, defamatory, hateful, racist, sexist, ethnically offensive or constituting harassment” are all arbitrary categories. What constitutes “hate speech”? And “dangerous” or “harassment”? These may look dumb questions to you because you already have a clear definition for all of these categories, but please consider that your definitions are not hard facts. I would rather have a different system:

1) Players are not to be banned for toxic chat behaviour, but the message “Username has been banned for toxicity.” should still be displayed. Let shame to its work;
2) Toxic players are automatically silenced during the “ban” time, from “team”, “all” and “voice” chats.

My rationale is: no one should have the authority to prevent you from speaking your mind (regardless of how much they disagree with you or how reprehensible your speech is), but you do not have the right to demand that other people listen to you).

Hard bans should be given only for cheating and repeated teamkilling (I say repeated because it already happened that I shot a teammate because she moved in front of me while I shot a camera).

Personally, I play mostly competitive (except for a first warm-up game) and I did not read a speech that fits the categories stated before (not that I can remember, at least), but the things I really hate is being called “noob” just because I made a mistake or had a bad day and people who write “gg ez” after a heartbreaking defeat. I play since day 1, but I cannot dedicate more that 2 hours per week to this game and, therefore, I don’t have time to “get good”

its well within the rights of the studio to police its game chat. The servers people are chatting on are private property not public. its like complaining that someone might remove you from a restaurant or even sporting event for making a scene.

we dont need to foster a system that is “fair” to these people becasue the worst thing anyone has called you is a noob. repeated offense should lead to a perma ban. wanna keep speaking your mind on private property, buy another ticket to the show.

I am not arguing against Ubisoft’s rights. I am stating why I believe that this way of policing the game chat is fundamentally wrong. I prefer the system I described: toxic players are muted but can still play (as long as they don’t indulge in other “toxic” behaviours, toxic from a gameplay point of view). Plus, it solves the problem only in part. One can overcome a long-term ban by registering a new account and buying the game again (and this is now a fairly cheap game) and there you have again a toxic player.

Well, game companies usually can’t do much about people re-buying games if banned. IP bans get handed out sometimes, but have their issues (both in being circumventable and causing problems for other people who happen to get that IP later). Usually buying abother copy to circumvent a ban is against the TOS but that’s hard to enforce unless it’s a well-known streamer or something.

Well… I would say that streamers and similar people already restrain themselves since they could actually be making money by playing. You raise a valid point and this is another reason why I am against permanent bans in the first place. A permanent ban goes against the “re-educational” concept of punishment itself

There is a clear definition of hate speech that can be found in about two seconds of google: ‘Hate speech is speech which attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as race, religion, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, disability, or gender. … A website which uses hate speech may be called a hate site.’

I hope it is implemented well, because it seems reasonable. I think the best comparison is how sports often punish unsportmanlike conduct. The anonymity of online games makes it even easier to harass people and be crude, so it’s no wonder Ubi and others would try to enforce some sort of code of sportsmanlike conduct.

Quitting “competitive” games was the best thing I’ve ever done. They’re all like a broken gambling machines and I can’t wait for the day they all go away. You never had toxicity when a admin had a dedicated server. So until the player are given back power they deserve all the toxicity in the world.

I played my fair share (and probably multiple other players’ shares) of FPS back in the days of dedicated servers, and while admins could certainly keep “toxicity” (previously known as banter) moderated they were often the source of the toxic behavior. Between kicks/bans for the slightest caprices, godmode rampages, individualized griefing and other practices, the admins in general were worse than any individual player, even the hackers (and if you really want to see the depths of badmin abuse, just look up Garry’s Mod).

I do agree on the dedicated server setup being superior to matchmaking in most ways, but admins were rarely benevolent and the popularity of matchmaking has more or less sealed the fate of dedicated servers.

>If you’re concerned about how this might affect you, consider that you’re likely being a dick and making video games worse.
You swore, that’s ethically offensive.
Ubisoft please ban Alice from chat.

All they need to do for ‘toxic’ chat is allow you to mute people. It’s game-play affecting stuff like teamkilling, destroying friendly gadgets, giving away positions in all chat, busting open sight lines for enemies, that should be getting attention.

Calling someone a dick could qualify as abusive, hateful, defamatory and potentially sexist. It’s a valid point, and I’m confused that you’re dismissing it as feeble snark.

“Don’t be a dick” may be a suitable and appropriate response to someone calling you a cunt but it still contravenes the policy Ubisoft has created, and I not only expect but demand that they enforce it equitably.

You must feel so strong and smart with those big words. It automatically makes you 100% correct!!! The person you’re replying to is absolutely correct, you are just being toxic and not supporting an open discussion. I cannot beleve sites like this and their following… “gaming journalism”…

The fact that you guys are taking the toxicity is funny, because we don’t give 2 shits about filtering, plus if you take toxicity out of the picture, theres no fun in it, it may be annoying at how we kill each other, but its fun in a way that its virtual.

If you got offended by a racial slur like ” the hard r ” suck it up will you, its just a fucking game, its not real life, Unless you want to make someone a sociopath, then go ahead its better that way..

And this game is PEGI 18! The “hate speech” is a part of the game and human personality, if you have a problem with it, you shouldn’t have bought the game in the first place! Now just remove the blood, the guns and make everybody hug each other and it’s gonna be all handy-dandy! You are the minority here, why should you dictate what we say and do!

It’s a good point that people shouldn’t have to be forced to read ingame chat. All that is needed here is a mute chat button. That is all. The author is ultra-sensitive, going as far as to call people “dicks”, very toxic and hypocritical. There is no need to monitor speech, labeling something “Hate Speech” does not magically make you correct. Why not whine to Ubisoft that there is no mute option so you can simply mute the chat of toxic players?

So if I call someone a sore loser or the “c word” for surrendering on the 4th round when it’s 2-1 and types “gg” in chat and picks recruit to troll, I’m the toxic one because I insulted him? I can understand racial and homophobic stuff but other insults are simply just words and if you’re gonna get offended at something you see or hear on the internet you’re just better off playing single player games and boarding yourself from the internet entirely. As the someone else above me said, it’s pegi 18, you’re supposedly an actual responsible adult and if you’re gonna let some words on the internet bother then you have other bigger problems. Might as well ban thermite from the game for using the “f word”